Driving down to Nork the next morning, I dropped off the feeder tramway
onto the fast belt south. Hanging from the feeder hook, waiting for an
open space in the line of cars, it occurred to me a lot of people were
on the road, both Nork-bound and northbound to Montral.
"Crimmus shopping," I said aloud, remembering, and swore mildly at the
slip. While the day--tomorrow, it was--still meant something to some,
it's not the kind of rational deformity you generally talk about.
Sara would, of course.
But I long ago faced the fact that Sara's a romantic. As neuroses go,
that's a mild one, and didn't even call automatically for correction.
All that it meant was that she was restricted to the C Population Zones
that she wouldn't leave anyway, and a little outside special tutoring
in the Realities for our children.
It wouldn't even affect my job or Civil Service rating. Still, if
Vermont were ever zoned Population B, there might be trouble. She
wouldn't leave Milbry.
Oho, I thought to myself, locking onto the Nork belt and
double-checking the destination coordinates, I am lapsing into
speculation--risky ground, for a Reporter. The code expressly forbids
speculation, and with reason.
Speculation uses an inadequate number of arbitrarily chosen half-truths
to shape conflicting possibilities, all but one of which time must
prove to be false. Truth is only what has already happened. Conjecture
is a laboratory matter for trained scientists to dabble in, under
laboratory controls. Judging from the scarcity of scientific news these
days, conjecture wasn't working there either.
Having neatly boxed myself into an uninformed generality, I grimaced,
took a dozer and slept all the way to Nork.
Back in my stag cubicle at the dorm, I fingered my chin in what
must have been pure atavism; it wasn't even close to time for a
depilatory booster. Sara--Sara, Sara, Sara--once urged me to skip the
pill some month and grow a beard, a mustache or something, like her
Four-Great-Grandfather Isaac, Elias Witherill's son. The one that was a
war major, in 1861.
I told her it was an aberration for her to have our sort of
relationship with a grandfather image, and besides a beard did mean
body hair in general and that itched. She said, well, I could instead
get a false beard, like Santa Claus, and then we had a really big
argument about what sorts of vulgarity were amusing, and which were not.
That broke off our second engagement, I think it was. Yes, the second.
Now she was pregnant, on purpose, we were going to get wed, and I had
just seven minutes to get to work.
* * * * *
My Scoop is in the usual sound-proofed, glass-walled isol-booth you'll
see anywhere in Nork. The fact that it is in a plaza at the 75th level
and thus under the open sky, a thing that bothers a lot of Nork people,
is to me more than mitigated by the view from the vestibule. You can
see, beyond the Liberty Statue International Memorial floating in New
York Bay over the former site of Times Square, to the Long Island shore
at Mineola and up into Conicut.
Today there wasn't time to look around. I formally relieved Vern, the
late-nightside Reporter, and had barely punched my ID against the time
clock when the District Reporter's face came on the viewer for visual
check.
"Reporter One-C Ben Marli. US-6044-230 988 368GN 0800/24 Deck 2047," I
said. The face nodded, faded.
Vern was still there when the viewer went blank. Most of us punch in
exactly on time and punch out exactly four hours later, to the minute.
Vern always comes on early and leaves late because, I think, his father
was convicted of advertising under the Edict, and Vern is still trying
to clear the family number.
"Quiet night, Ben. Just one accident," he said. I was leafing through
the little pile of dupes--simultypes of the stories that had gone into
the Scoop, with the ibems of the Source and his or her Second--and was
seeing this for myself, so I just grunted.
Then one, the accident he'd spoken of, brought me up sharp.
On the face it was a straight item: the Source, Retailer Mark Neman,
US2109-590-412 663CC, a visitor to Nork, had told of an accident
involving one Housewife Ela Brand in a store on the 24th level,
unnamed, of course. She fell on an antique glass bowl, which broke and
cut her neck severely. The store's security guard substantiated the
story, adding that the woman had nearly bled to death from a severed
carotid artery before arrival of the store doctor. He had been delayed
by the nearly unheard-of circumstance of the birth of twins in the
store's infirmary.
First aid by an unidentified passerby saved the accident victim's life,
according to both Source and Second.
The doctor was unable to perform as Second because, while the victim
was physically able to go on her way after normal treatment, she had
had to be clinicked for "irrational grief reaction" over loss of the
bowl she had fallen on. Even so, the novel injury, rare these days,
would have made it a play story in _Sun_ editions across the nation, at
a quiet time like the end of the year.
"Vern, Vern," I said. "Don't you know a Plant when you hear one? Surely
you should recognize a Flack's work, if anybody could," I told him.
Maybe it was unkind to talk about Flacks, when his father had been one;
but any time the truth hurts, it's the pain of healing.
"It's a pretty elaborate plant, but phony as faith," I said more
gently. "That bowl fairly screams 'Gift.' Are you forgetting tomorrow's
Crimmus, and that all over the country Flacks are pulling tricks like
this?"
Vern, pale, said defensively, "Ben, look. The Source's ID checked
without a hitch. He's a retailer in Dals, Tex. The guard's cleared
too. The doctor verified by phone, from the clinic. You going to tell
me that a doctor would lie or be mistaken about an accident like that,
or that it could be faked in a crowded store, or that any woman'd risk
bleeding to death for Flack money?
"I know the Flacks are out in droves. But this has got to be a
legitimate story."
"It's a phony," I said. "The gift is just too integral. Don't be slow
to punch the button on a deal like this."